collected snippets of immediate importance...


Monday, May 28, 2007

myth of preemption in '67, and more generally excellent background on israeli occupation and aggression:
The New York Times quoted Prime Minister Menachem Begin's (1977 - 83) August, 1982 speech saying: "In June, 1967, we had a choice. The Egyptian Army concentrations in the Sinai approaches do not prove that (President Gamal Abdel) Nasser (1956 - 70) was really about to attack us. We must be honest with ourselves. We decided to attack him."
(...) General Mordechai Hod, Commander of the Israeli Air Force during the Six-Day War said in 1978: "Sixteen years of planning had gone into those initial eighty minutes. We lived with the plan, we slept on the plan, we ate the plan. Constantly we perfected it."
(...) Other Israeli leaders and generals voiced the same sentiment that in June, 1967 Israel was under no threat, yet preemptively undertook a war of aggression falsely telling the world it had no other choice. It had a clear one. It could have chosen peace, but didn't and never did earlier or since to the present because discretionary aggressive wars of choice serve Israeli interests as they do its US imperial partner.
(...) In 1967, it was the Jewish state's third major aggressive war that grew out of the founding of Zionism in 1897 by Theodor Herzl aiming to establish a permanent Jewish state. He planned the first Zionist Congress in Basle, Switzerland, became its first president, and envisioned a permanent Jewish homeland in Palestine justified by what Professor Norman Finkelstein called the "colossal hoax" Jews got there first establishing their ancestral home on "a land without people for a people without land." It became the state of Israel in May, 1948 during the new Jewish state's first preemptive aggressive so-called "War of Independence" Palestinians call "al-Nakba" - the catastrophe.
(...) Israel used what it got then for its one-sided blitzkrieg ending June 10 with Israeli forces completing the job left unfinished following their 1948 "War of Independence." They took the remaining 22% of ancient Palestine comprising Gaza and the West Bank, and on June 6, 2007 will have held the territories for 40 repressive years of the longest continuous illegal occupation in the world under which Palestinians (including Israeli citizens and Palestinian Christians) lost their personal, political and economic freedoms under Israeli rule affording those rights only to Jews.
(...) Tiny Israel today (with six million Jews) gets more US financial aid (in all direct and indirect forms) than all other countries in the world combined.
(...) It must include a demand that the world community of nations ends the "last taboo" of silence when it comes to Israel. It must be willing to expose and denounce what no longer can be tolerated that current South African Intelligence Minister Ronnie Kasrils calls worse than apartheid saying Israel "behav(es) like fascists when they do certain things (like attacking Palestinians with helicopter gunships and tanks)." What better time to do what Kasrils is surely calling for than on the 40th anniversary of the longest continuous occupation in the world that no longer can be tolerated.

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